


dream and certainty

by mayleavestars



Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: (because jadzia's alive!), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bajoran Culture, F/F, Fix-It, Post-Canon, Weddings, a bit of it anyway, also some trill culture. probably not enough., extreme sap but they're getting MARRIED so it's fine!, more of an ensemble cast than was originally intended
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-13 02:49:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15354576
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayleavestars/pseuds/mayleavestars
Summary: She had used to look upon Jadzia and feel that she’d taken hold of something precious that didn’t quite belong to her; that she was like Lira Emil, who’d stolen the secret of weaving from the Prophets in the days of the world’s creation. She doesn’t feel like that anymore; looking at Jadzia’s answering smile, she knows they deserve each other wholeheartedly.Kira and Dax get married, everybody's happy, and no-one dies.





	dream and certainty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cacti_Lord](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cacti_Lord/gifts).



> The prompt was "Kira Nerys/Jadzia Dax- They get married and it's a nice mix of Bajoran and Trill customs. Sisko officiates. No one dies. Everyone's happy." I enjoyed writing this a lot, and I really hope you like it! 
> 
> Musings on the canon divergence at the end.

In a perfect world, Nerys thinks, returning from a temporary state of godhood will have been a justified time to withdraw from the society of others for a month or so, reveling solely in the company of one’s wife, son, and newborn daughter. As it was, less than a day after appearing on the Promenade in a blaze of white light, Benjamin Sisko can be found in his old office, dealing with the apparent administrative duties of a returning Emissary.

He was the last witness to Dukat’s death, could he fill out a paper testifying to it? Could he perhaps describe his experience with the Prophets to a few curious well-wishers? What did he ask of his humble audience, now that he had witnessed unearthly wonders in the Celestial Temple?

Nerys deflects these requests when she can; she had experienced a taste of celebrity in the aftermath of the Dominion War, and found that she did not care for it. And as much as she’s filled with reverence for the man who once more walked the earth beside her, she knows that he doesn’t need it from her.

Nonetheless, a week after the flood of Vedeks and mayors and simple Bajoran citizens whom Benjamin never turns away has cleared up, Nerys finds herself standing outside the door, waiting to ask a boon of the Emissary.

“You know you don’t need to wait to come in,” he says in the familiar resounding voice, and Nerys smiles nervously. She has not been this shy in his presence since a few years before the war, when he’d nearly died on the Defiant and shown her that baseball match afterward.

“I’m sorry, Benjamin,” she says; she realizes she’s defaulted to what Jadzia calls him, and his smile indicates that he’s thinking the same thing. “This is strange for me. But I have a request.”

“You know any request from you would be welcome,” says Ben, and Nerys remembers not to shy away from the phrase. One of the first things that he’d done, upon return, was to take Nerys aside and thank her profusely for ‘everything you’ve done for Jake during these months’.

He had sounded so wracked with guilt over parting from his son that she hadn’t had the heart to say that she hadn’t seen how her company had helped; only his return had. Even now, his continued gratitude seems unwarranted. A younger Nerys would have pointed this out, but here and now she stands firm.

“If you could,” she says slowly, “I’m getting married in about a month - I’d like you to officiate. As an Emissary, and as a former captain.”

He looks up sharply. “Of course I’ll do it,” he says. “But I’m surprised - towards the end of the war, you and Jadzia were talking as if it would happen any day. Did you really wait all these months?”

“As if you’d have been fine with missing Jadzia’s wedding!” Kira laughs; and then once she’d started finds that she can’t stop as soon as she’d thought she would. Benjamin joins in; she’d forgotten how she’d missed that booming chuckle.

“As if either of us would have been fine with you missing it,” she adds in a more somber tone of voice, and Benjamin positively beams.

-

When Jadzia enters their quarters, a week before the wedding is to take place, she finds Nerys painstakingly tying the stems of two flowers together. They’re a deep orange, and gorgeous; Jadzia has seen them on their excursions to Bajor. “What is that?” she asks. “A wedding tradition?”

“I don’t know if I’d call it a tradition,” says Nerys; her voice is soft and serious, as it always is when when she’s focused on a daunting task. “They’re new. Before the occupation, a bride would stitch a length of beads; during the Occupation, we did what we could, which wasn’t much. And now, some of the younger couples are doing flowers instead of beads. It’s meant to bind us to the Earth, remind us what we haven’t lost in the light of the Occupation.” She looks up at Jadzia, brown eyes wide, as if Jadzia’s about to laugh at Nerys for doing something unorthodox.

Instead, Jadzia sits down across from her. “Should I make one?” she asks curiously, watching Nerys tie the flowers together with nimble fingers. She remembers watching them during the war, loading phasers, or working controls. She cannot remember seeing Nerys engaged in something as straightforward as a wedding garland.

Nerys sees her watching, and laughs. “I’m not very good at it,” she admits. “Remember those bird sculptures?”

“I liked the bird sculptures,” Jadzia says with exaggerated loyalty. “They were thought-provokingly abstract. Reminded me of the work of a famous Vulcan artist -”

She doesn’t finish the sentence; they’re both laughing now, bending towards one another over the flower-strewn table, and Jadzia kisses her spontaneously; because Nerys is beautiful when she smiles, or because the smiles’ greater recent frequency has not undermined this fact, or because she’s making a _flower garland_ for their _wedding_.

“You know I love it,” Jadzia says when they’ve both finished a third of their respective garlands. “I don’t care if it’s crooked or anything, I wouldn’t care, I love it anyway.”

“But I bet you’re glad I’m making flower garlands instead of bird sculptures,” says Nerys mischievously, poking Jadzia with a stem, and Jadzia laughs in mock dismay.

“I meant it!” she says insistently, and Kira smiles up at her.

“I know,” she assures Jadzia. “And there’s nobody I’d rather return to my artisan roots for than you.”

-

Kira has made her peace with Odo’s inability to attend the wedding. He’s her oldest friend, her partner in the Occupation’s remembrance; she’d have liked for him to be there. But he’s doing things; more important things than this; the Founders are his people, for all their flaws, and she understands that.

It’s to her shock, then, that two days before the wedding is scheduled, Odo walks into Ops. “Quark fetched me,” he says as explanation, and Kira gapes.

“Quark left on a - a business trip, fifteen days ago.”

“He’s a master of lies and deceit,” says Odo, in the same upright way that he has, and Kira finds herself laughing helplessly.

When they’re sitting in Quark’s, and he asks her how she feels about the upcoming wedding, she doesn’t quite know how to answer. “Not quite disbelieving,” she explains, “not anymore. But it felt like that for a while.”

To someone else in the senior staff, she might have had to explain before the war. But Odo knows; he remembers. There were people who got married during the Occupation, even in the Resistance. There were people for who life went on parallel to it. Those people had a strength a young Nerys hadn’t fully grasped; she hadn’t imagined living past the Occupation, certainly not marriage at any point.

It wasn’t just meeting Jadzia who had changed that; it was growing up, it was living through the war and knowing she wanted to establish lasting, gorgeous things within the scope of her life. But it was Jadzia, too; the flash of her eyes and her ow teasing voice; the encouragement as much as the flirting, going through it with her and coming to realize all the precious, vital ways within which they fit together.

“So not quite disbelieving,” she says at last, “but there’s a shade of that. There’s a line from Akorem Laan’s later works, I guess you could translate it as _accept life’s treasures and its wonders, for they are the gifts of the Prophets, and the Prophets give freely_. It’s like that, maybe.”

There must have been something to what she said, because Odo takes the time to form himself a smile; the same genuine smile, assembled as it is, that she has missed for all these months.

-

In the Dax Symbiont’s experience with marriage, it has discovered over the years that there are only two primary varieties of pre-wedding activity. There are those who view it as a night of spiritual preparation; there are those who view it as a good opportunity for a party. She remembers a young Curzon’s surprise at the Klingons’ opting toward the former, and his utter lack of shock at the Terrans' taking the latter route.

So it’s simple: Kira prays in the shrine, collecting herself for an upcoming spiritual bond. Jadzia overtakes Quark’s for the night for a party of grand proportions, and if it now brings back the memories of the rare occasions they’d had to celebrate over the span of the Dominion War, so much the better for it. She wonders sometimes if she’d rather have married Nerys before the ghosts of the war had overtaken Deep Space Nine. But here and now, surrounded by the laughter of her friends and the bright colors of dancing couples, she knows there is power in doing it at this moment. She and Nerys have seen each other back to front and inside and out; in terror, in joy, and in the treacherous tenacity of holding on in the face of near-certain death. Jadzia has stood at Ben’s right hand as he invaded Cardassia, and thought of Nerys below, and hoped against hope that the Prophets were watching over their brightest, bravest defender.

Julian plops down next to her, drink in hand; he’d flown in from Cardassia Prime that evening. “You know why I’m glad we beat the Dominion?” he asks cheerfully.

“Plenty of reasons, if you’re a sane man,” Jadzia says, “but sure, I’ll bite. Tell me why.”

“I get to witness the I’m-Thinking-About-Kira-Nerys smile,” he says brightly, “not the I’m-Thinking-About-Kira-And-Also-Our-Impending-Deaths expression.” He looks around at the dancers around them: Leeta and Rom, Miles and Keiko, the new and the familiar faces of the station Jadzia has come to think of as the best home she has.

Jadzia laughs, more because she agrees wholeheartedly than because Julian’s being genuinely funny. “Trust me,” she says, “I’m more glad than anyone.”

“Good.” He squeezes her arm; it’s not the thoughtless, forward Julian that she’d met eight years ago, but his joviality shows shades of his younger self, and Jadzia is grateful for it. “I’m so happy for you, Jadzia, truly.”

He’s earnest when he says it, and Jadzia’s heart is warmed. She felt old sometimes, unfairly so; disconnected from the people Jadzia Idaris would have been on the level of. Interacting with Julian had made her feel old; falling in love with Nerys, she thinks now, made her remember how young she was in relation to the universe at large.

She sees her, then, leaving the temple; brown eyes meet blue across the room, as if Nerys will know where she’s sitting. Nerys smiles, almost shy, like she was when they’d first met and Jadzia had to coax her into doing simple things with her.

And then Nerys smiles, warm and charming and captivating, and Jadzia helplessly smiles back; Julian snorts slightly beside her, and he narrowly misses her affectionate swat on the head.

“Don’t push it,” she warns him, but she’s grinning as she says it.

-

Trill - or at least Dax - tend to go in for interspecies romance; paradoxically, then, Nerys knows she’s one of the first outsiders to say a Trill wedding vow. Reaching out to carefully place her hand on Jadzia’s abdomen, she says the sounds she’s carefully memorized over the past days, but it’s the meaning that sticks in her mind. _I pledge myself to you, and to you; to the two halves of your whole, to the two wholes of your whole, until death takes you from me and from me and from yourself_. Jadzia repeats it; and much as it makes no real sense when addressed to a non-Trill, Nerys thinks there’s worth to it all the same. There’s a duality to everyone, symbiont or not; and she smiles as she feels Jadzia’s hand leave her.

The Bajoran wedding vow comes next; and it’s Benjamin, now, who speaks the words Nerys has committed to memory, the ones that have stayed constant from the days before the Occupation, in the rushed, fierce-eyed ceremonies Nerys witnessed in the resistance and in the free delight of the couples Benjamin blesses. “May your fields be golden, your skies blue; may the Prophets honor you as you honor them, and may you join together under their stars.”

Nerys feels tear-tracks on her face, and remembers the poetry she’d quoted at Odo. She had used to look upon Jadzia and feel that she’d taken hold of something precious that didn’t quite belong to her; that she was like Lira Emil, who’d stolen the secret of weaving from the Prophets in the days of the world’s creation. She doesn’t feel like that anymore; looking at Jadzia’s answering smile, she knows they deserve each other wholeheartedly.

She and Jadzia light the candles that stand before Benjamin; it’s their pledge to uphold their end of the blessing he’s given them. And then they kiss; this is not part of the Bajoran ceremony, but it seems as good a time as any.

When they dance outside, on the grand terrace of the house Benjamin’s family is still in the process of building, Jadzia tightens her hold on Nerys’ waist and tips her head up to look at the emerging stars. “It’s funny,” she said. “I’ve seen so many weddings in my day, and there’s been dancing at almost every one.”

Nerys nods in acknowledgement, and laughs as Jadzia spins her around; the lights around her blur for a moment, and she knows Jadzia’s hit on something. Everyone in this galaxy has some yearning for closeness and celebration, for the feeling of a hand in theirs and the sound of music surrounding them. Here and now Nerys can hear the strains of Bajoran _ti’liera_ pipes mingled with a Trill string instrument she can’t recall the name of.

She wonders how to express to Jadzia that it’s been a long, long time since she’s pictured herself dancing at her wedding to anything other than that rare and perfect combination, but a look at her face is enough to know that she knows it already. So instead Nerys tightens her grip on Jadzia’s hand, steps in tune with the music, and thanks the Prophets for the victory, for her friends, and for her wife.

The stars come out above them as they dance.

**Author's Note:**

> so i didn't put a lot of thought into the shape of the canon divergence but the way i see it it's like, jadzia praying in the temple when dukat comes in because she's having a child with worf, right? so if she's in a Serious Relationship by the time worf comes into the picture, they don't get together and they don't have a kid and therefore jadzia's in a different place at the time of dukat's entry. voila. 
> 
> i guess in this setting ezri is out there somewhere living her best life, and julian gets around faster to committing to the individual he is actually interested in. well, subtextually. i'm sorry about the somewhat contrived "oh everyone's just showing up for the wedding" thing but i wanted it to kind of have a The Gang's All Here vibe
> 
> much thanks to this [ds9 noise generator](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rTHBePCDX4&t=641s) that i ended up listening to every time on worked on this
> 
> oh yeah and the title is from the marius and cosette's wedding chapter of les miserables, because i'm the person i am


End file.
